TAKE a trip back in time with Kate Atherton’s selection of the season’s best historical fiction…

In 9AD, Germanic tribes destroyed three of Rome’s legions in the Teutoburg Forest and seized their eagles, a legion’s sacred standard, in Rome’s most infamous defeat. In Ben Kane’s best novel to date, the reader is thrown into the heart of the ambush, the tension and the violence mounting as we follow Varus, the unfortunate general in charge, into the forest with his hardened centurion Tullus and Arminius, the man who betrayed the Romans. Eagles At War combines action with character-driven adventure, resulting in military historical fiction at its best.

Deadly Election by Lindsey Davis (Hodder & Stoughton, £16.99)

With Falco retired, it’s up to his daughter Flavius Albia to look after the family’s auction business. Her investigative inheritance is tested when a ripe body is discovered inside one of the lots and with Rome in the first century AD engaged in public elections, soon a connection is made between the two. With the (increasingly romantic) help of magistrate Faustus, Flavia becomes embroiled in political shenanigans. Davis’s wit and meticulous research bring the period to life.

The Lady Of Misrule by Suzannah Dunn (Little, Brown, £14.99)

When Lady Jane Grey is escorted to prison in the Tower of London, she is attended by Elizabeth Tilney, a Catholic girl who has little in common with this quiet Protestant. Elizabeth reports on her shared confinement with Jane, Jane’s rise to power and dramatically swift fall and the men who directed her fate. Jane’s husband Guildford Dudley is another prisoner and it is his story that unexpectedly proves to be the most poignant element of this beautifully written novel.

Holy Spy by Rory Clements (Hodder & Stoughton, £14.99)

Mary Queen of Scots has been moved to a stronger fortress in response to the Pope’s call to replace Elizabeth I with her cousin. John Shakespeare, the playwright’s brother, infiltrates the Babington Plot to assassinate Elizabeth and weaves a trap to ensnare the plotters and to incriminate Mary. Meanwhile, a woman John once loved will hang for her rich husband’s murder if John cannot clear her name. This sensitive novel paints a disturbingly convincing portrait of late-Elizabethan England.

The Scrivener by Robin Blake (Constable, £19.99)

It is 1742 and Preston is about to celebrate its grand festival but the festival funds are locked in Preston’s first bank and Pimbo, the banker, lies shot dead at his desk, the vault key missing. Coroner Titus Cragg and Dr Luke Fidelis investigate, unable to agree on murder or suicide, and uncover Pimbo’s slave trade links while the recovery of an apostle spoon hints at lost Civil War treasure. Titus is our likeable, fair, humorous narrator, ready to stand up to the threats and bombast of those who prefer the truth to stay hidden.

PH

The Green Road by Anne Enright and Hunters In The Dark by Lawrence Osborne are bound to impress

Slick lit

From a family in turmoil to a man who steals another’s identity, this week’s choices are bound to impress

The Green Road by Anne Enright (Jonathan Cape, £17.99)

The Madigan children are heading home for Christmas, bringing with them a lifetime of affection, antipathy and all the mixed-up emotions that a reunion heralds. But things are especially fraught in 2005 because their beautiful, impossible, eternally disappointed mother

Rosaleen has decided to sell the family home and divide the proceeds between the four of them. It’s a move calculated to antagonise, a not-so-gentle reminder of just how difficult it can be to deal with her (always thwarted) expectations of them with their shortcomings and foibles and failures. So it’s little wonder that the festive spirit is in short supply as Hanna, Dan, Emmet and Constance head back to Ardeevin on the west coast of Ireland, close to the wild sweep of the Atlantic.

Enright’s prose glitters and gleams like sunlit water, sparkling with sharp-eyed insight and a disarming wit, drawing you closer and closer into her characters’ stories and carefully uncovering thoughts and feelings in a way that’s vivid and revealing.

There’s Dan, the failed priest and a golden boy who is visiting from Toronto, leaving behind the fiancée his family know nothing about. Emmet is in a similar emotional predicament, burnt out by charity work in poverty-stricken countries, half in love but mostly worn out by the thought of spending time with his mother and his family with “their small hearts (his own was not entirely huge) and the small lives they put themselves through”.

There’s Hanna with a tiny baby, a drink problem and an acting career that appears to be going nowhere; and Constance, loyal, loving and in charge of doing the Christmas shop, a breathless catalogue of comestibles and exasperations, and who is facing a testing time healthwise.

At the heart of the drama is Rosaleen Considine, who married beneath her and has “been waiting, all her life, for something that never happened and she could not bear the suspense any longer... She might kill herself just to get something done”. Dramatic, passionate and narcissistic, she causes uproar and worry on Christmas Day by taking herself off to the Green Road, “the most beautiful road in the world, bar none... famed in song and story”, to nurse her grievances and to wonder “why was there no one to love her” and, once again, she becomes the focus of all their emotional conundrums.

It’s subtly done, a beautifully observed study of motivation and memory, nuanced and funny and sad. The novel ends with Rosaleen’s melancholy remark: “I have paid too little attention,” she said. “I think that’s the problem. I should have paid more attention to things.” This is not an accusation that can be levelled at Anne Enright, who is acutely aware of the accumulation of moments that shape a life.

VERDICT: 5/5

Eithne Farry

Hunters In The Dark by Lawrence Osborne (Hogarth Press, £12.99)

Hunters In The Dark is Lawrence Osborne’s third strong novel in a row and this rare achievement is made all the more impressive because each of these three novels has improved on the last.

The Forgiven (2013), though excellent, had an overfamiliar set-up. Last year’s The Ballad Of A Small Player was compellingly melancholy from beginning to end but possessed a certain listlessness common to gambling narratives. This time the listlessness is gone, replaced with an enjoyably serpentine plot.

Hunters In The Dark shares something of the mood of Osborne’s last novel but while the protagonist of that book gambled with cards, this one, Robert Grieve, plays with his life. A 30-year-old teacher fed up with his job, he travels to Thailand where he meets a mysterious American. After a night of opium smoking, he awakes in the man’s clothes and decides that he will steal his identity.

He finds himself on a relatively prosaic path, teaching English to a doctor’s daughter and pretending to be a former businessman. The doctor likes to unsettle Robert with macabre talk and the daughter already speaks perfect English, but they welcome him into the family and, beginning an affair with the daughter, he can imagine a satisfying future for the first time in his life. But while he’s stealing the American’s identity, the American is making off with his money, sparking a chain of events that will put every character’s life in danger.

Though Osborne’s characters feel like men out of time, his world is a recognisably 21st century one where drifting no longer offers an existential freedom but instead makes a man into a potential target.

Osborne’s style and milieu has clearly been informed by Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh and, in this novel, Patricia Highsmith but in place of Greene and Waugh’s Catholicism, he explores the supernatural beliefs of the inhabitants of Bangkok.

His novels start out as noir narratives but whereas noir is usually a nihilist genre, often ending with the death of the protagonist, for Osborne’s characters there is a world beyond death. A bullet fired from a gun is as often the beginning as the end and his protagonists cause as much trouble dead as they do alive. The literary thriller is an awkward genre, usually lacking in either thrills or quality of prose, but with Hunters In The Dark, Osborne has proved once again that he can handle both and with aplomb.